Humans / Planet Earth

[ll_billym]

So have humans actually done ANYTHING to improve this planet during our existance or would the place be much better off without us?

[smudge]

Now that is a very good question - can't wait to read the answers!

[archbishop]

Half GAB Smudge. The planet must be doing something right or else we wouldn't be here and obviously we then wouldn't care.

I actually think that, what we perceive as wrong with this planet is scaremongering and everything is fixable and if it isn't it's our own fault. So be it.

[stoo_pid]

the problem is archbishop that it's not us that has to fix it - its our children & our children's children that will have to find a way of clearing up our mess.

 

[Cheesefreek]

I'm sure that our children and our children's children will create their own mess - and solutions.  We're not the baddies and them the goodies.  It's always worked like this - it's only more dramatic now since technology is outrunning us.  What's the solution?  People do more good than bad.  It's just the bad that gets most of the headlines.

[D.G.W.T.H.]

I believe that humans are the only ones to benefit from all of our "improvements and advances".  Don't get me wrong,  I wouldn't go without my car,  cellphone or computer just to name a few examples.  But at what cost have these things come?  We are slowly destroying this planet.  In my mind,  man can be best described as a bacteria (similar to the thoughts of Agent Smith in The Matrix).  Just look at what we are doing to the world.  We have depleted most of the natural resources and over-populated large areas of the world.  How long can we sustain this at the rate we are going?  It seems the best we can do with our "technological marvels" is to indicate just how much of a mess we are making of things.

[stoo_pid]

cheesefreak - doesn't really matter whether its us or our children or their children etc who make the mess.  The point is that the people who do make the mess are never the people who clear it up.

[ll_billym]

So c'mon then Cheesefreek, you say humans do more good than bad, give me an example of how humanity has made this planet a better place.  And cleaning up any mess we made in the first place does not qualify.....

[smudge]

archbishop, I still don't know what GAB means, let alone a half GAB! But please don't let that turn into another GAB discussion, it does my head in!

 

I'm enjoying the answers on here though & shall be thinking of what to write whilst I'm doing my ironing - yawn!

[Fat Boy]

actually cheesfreek it hasn't always been like this.  it all started going t!ts-up big style for the planet when we started the industrial revolution.

[Octavius]

I don't think you could actually say we have IMPROVED the planet, since the natural habitat is surely the essence of ecological perfection in itself.  We have however improved the planets environment for our own benefit, survival and pleasure (buildings, transport etc).  In 100 years time our grand kids, or whatever may find that all our green ideas were complete tosh and detrimental to the environement anyway.  Has space improved because we have explored it?  No.

[archbishop]

Smudge your daughter will tell you.

[ezapf]

Is it even possible for humans to improve a planet - I mean besides fixing problems they previously caused?

Earth may have been better off without us, but then who would care?

[Moog]

Probably straying away from the original question here slightly, but as archbishop mentions in his answer the perception of human impact on our planet is a contentious issue. Take for example the matter of the disposal of Brent Spar by Shell. Greenpeace whipped up a tremendous amount of anti-shell opinion with their opposition to Shell dumping the rig in the North Atlantic to the point where Shell eventually changed plans decontaminated and re-cycled the rig [as a ferry I think!]. Greenpeace claimed that the toxins within the rig and the structure itself would have a huge negative impact on the sea floor environment. But in fact the environmental cost of the recycling it in terms of the amount of energy used probably outweighed that of the dumping proposal, especially when you consider the huge amount of "toxic" material that is naturally pumped onto the sea floor every year by black smokers, the contents and structure of the Brent Spar would have been a drop in the ocean [forgive the pun!] compared to this.

In terms of the original question you could ask the same of most organisms on the planet, we are all to a certain extent parasites feeding off the world's resources.  In my opinion it's more a question of sustainability, can the planet continue to survive depletion of it's resources and altering of it's environments and ecosystems by humans? I think so. Will we as humans eventually destroy our own environment to the point human life on Earth becomes impossible? Probably, then the planet will just get on with it's own business and some other organism will evovle to replace us... just my opinion!